The Science That Seeks Its Own Destruction
Theology doesn't lead us to answers. It teaches us to revel in the mystery.
In 1914, ninety-three German Christian intellectuals—including nearly all of Karl Barth’s theology professors—signed a manifesto endorsing Kaiser Wilhelm’s war. Barth was gobsmacked. The Church, which he had been taught was the pure expression of the Gospel, the leaven in the loaf of society, deferred to the state, stooped itself low, and blessed the trenches in the name of the Prince of Peace.
Barth’s response came in his commentary on Romans, where he wrote: “The Gospel dissolves the Church, and the Church dissolves the Gospel.”
His fiery rhetoric in the Römerbrief wasn’t an attack on the Church. It was a prophetic call to the Body of Christ, begging the Bride to return to her first love. To accept the Word of God as a treasure held in trust, not a commodity to be deployed in service to earthly kingdoms. Barth was raging against the most persistent and pernicious sin of Christendom: the errant belief that the Church possesses the Word and is free to do with it what she will.
The Gospel calls the Church into being. And then it judges every version of the Church that shows up. Every institution. Every theology. Every confident system that claims to have captured the Word of God in a net of propositions.
Suffering or Triumph
In 1968, James Cone—son of Bearden, Arkansas, who watched his father nearly get lynched for filing a school integration lawsuit—declared his “liberation from the bondage of white theology.” Just as liberal Protestants a half-century earlier had rubber stamped the most destructive war to that point in history, the white, southern Church enabled the unspeakable violence and oppression of the Jim Crow era. Cone was just as vocal and provocative in his denunciation as Barth had been in the Römerbrief.
I can’t think of a single cultural artifact Barth and Cone would have shared. And yet they circle the same truth from different directions.
Barth characterizes the Church as a community participating in Christ’s victory, Cone as a community participating in Christ’s suffering—and these two seemingly opposing claims are the heart of the Church’s story.
In the incarnation of Jesus Christ, suffering and triumph converge. The cross and the resurrection are not sequential events that cancel each other out. They’re held together in the ongoing life of God. And the Church—if it is the Church at all—must hold them together too.
A False Choice
Every claim about God emerges from a particular body, a particular history, a particular set of wounds and hopes. And yet every claim must also submit itself to the universality of the Gospel, the final authority of the Word of God. The particularity of our perspective doesn’t get the final word.
So we have a choice to make. Is theology irreducibly contextual—always emerging from a particular body, a particular history, a particular set of wounds? Or does it answer to a transcendent standard that exceeds all contexts? Is the Black experience the hermeneutical key, or is the revelation of God in Christ?
But this is a false choice, and its falseness is borne out by how easy it makes things seem. The truth for anyone who has attempted to live and proclaim the Gospel is this: You don’t get the luxury of resolved contradictions because your lived experience is the contradiction.
You preach resurrection to a congregation that knows death intimately. You proclaim the goodness of God to people whose bodies and histories testify to abandonment. You hold onto hope with hands that have learned what it means to have everything slip through their fingers.
We pray “give us our daily bread” when we’ve never known what it’s like to miss a meal. We hear “blessed are the poor” and go out to dinner. We hear Jesus say “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” and go home to a king size mattress.
We can’t resolve these tensions. We can only let them do their work on us.
Submitting the Gospel to the Gospel
The work of theology is not to build a system you can learn and apply. It is to submit all things to the Gospel of Jesus Christ—including your understanding of the Gospel. We don’t theologize in order to possess God. We theologize in order to be possessed. We don’t study the Word in order to master it. We study so that we might be mastered, broken open, reconstituted into something more like the image we were always meant to bear.
To be confronted by the Gospel is to enter a hall of mirrors. The Gospel that tells me God is love also tells me I don’t yet know what love means. The Gospel that tells me Christ has overcome also tells me I will participate in his suffering. The Gospel that promises resurrection also hands me a cross. At every turn I see myself, and yet, not myself. Through a glass darkly, waiting to be known so I can finally know.
This sounds like infinite regress. But it’s not, because the Gospel is a living Word, not a set of propositions. It confronts me, calls me into being, and then judges every version of myself that shows up to respond.
The destination is real. The eschaton is not a metaphor. Resurrection is not a symbol for the dialectical process—it’s the actual end toward which all our suffering and all our hoping points. But we likely won’t arrive in this life, so the journey matters. The process of sanctification—real movement toward a real end—is itself the shape of faithfulness.
Theology is the science that seeks its own destruction—not annihilation, but the constant breaking open of every settled thing we thought we knew. Until at last we come to the fullness of the Gospel, and every proposition dissolves into praise.